People ask me fairly often whether they should train more or train harder. It’s the old volume or intensity question, and when I hear it, I usually think of one cyclist I train.

He has barely done an extreme workout in his life. He rarely rides longer than three hours. What he does is ride five or six days a week, never too long and never too hard, and he has done that for close to twenty years. When a multi-day bikepacking trip comes up, he rides all day, then does it again the next day, and the one after. There’s nothing heroic about it for him. Riding nearly every day is just what his body is used to.

I was the opposite. As a quadrathlete I had four sports to share out, so I usually had one or two in focus and the others on hold. I rode a lot in some months and hardly at all in others. I did the long rides and the hard intervals. And I’ve never done a multi-day ride, because I never built a body that could.

The Question Is Part of the Problem

So the question itself is part of the problem. Endurance training is a lot like diets. Something new comes along every few years, the extreme versions get the attention, and people pick a side. But it isn’t veggies against meat, and it isn’t long slow miles against intervals either. In both cases what matters is whether you can keep doing it, and whether it’s getting you where you want to go.

Keeping it up has two sides. You have to be able to absorb what you’re doing, because too much of anything ends in burnout or overtraining. And you have to be able to repeat it — this week, next week, next month, next season. That’s the same reason habits that actually stick tend to be the unremarkable ones.

So before volume or intensity come into it, I look at whether the training happens regularly at all. Volume is what regular training slowly turns into. Intensity is worth adding once there’s something solid underneath it. And recovery sits under the whole thing, because without it none of the work becomes fitness. Sports science has its own model here — frequency, intensity, time and type — and it’s a good one. But for someone with a job and a family, what the plan says about frequency matters much less than whether the week actually happens.

Averages Hide the Missing Weeks

The trouble is that missing weeks are easy to overlook, because averages hide them. I learned that in seasons when I’d booked too many races. The preparation went well. I had the long days, the interval days, even the rest days, for weeks on end. I was ready. Then the season started and training began to leak away. Travel took a day here, tiredness after a race took two there, and resting before the next race took a few more.

If I looked at a month, the hours were close enough to the plan. When I looked at the weeks, it was a mess: days missed, too many race weekends, and big catch-up sessions to make up for whatever had slipped. In quadrathlon that’s especially easy. You fall behind in the swimming or the kayak, and you try to fix it with one longer or harder session instead of the three normal ones you missed. Over the month it adds up to roughly the right number. Your body doesn’t count by the month, though.

The Break, and the Catch-Up

You see the same thing between seasons. Someone stops completely for two, three, four months, then comes back and tries to pick up where they left off, as if the break hadn’t happened. It’s one of the reasons the plan stops being a plan for so many people after 40.

Those catch-up sessions are also where recovery comes in. A hard session after a missed week has to be paid for on top of everything else the body is already dealing with, and if that bill is bigger than what sleep and easy days can cover, the fitness simply doesn’t come. Some sports charge a lot more than others for the same hour, which is worth knowing before you decide which missed session to make up.

What I Actually Ask to See

So when someone asks me whether to do more or go harder, I ask to see their last eight weeks. Week by week, not month by month. That usually tells me more than any plan would, and most of the time it shows me the same thing: a week that keeps not happening.

Questions People Ask

Is volume or intensity more important for endurance training?

Neither comes first. Consistency does, because volume is built out of regular training and intensity only pays off once there’s a base underneath it. Without regular weeks, adding more or going harder mostly adds fatigue.

Can I make up a missed session with a longer one?

Occasionally, but it rarely works as well as it looks on paper. One long or hard session costs more recovery than the normal sessions it replaces, and it lands on a body that has just had a gap.

How do I know if my training is consistent enough?

Look at the last eight weeks one week at a time rather than as a monthly total. Monthly hours can look right while individual weeks have large gaps in them.

How should I restart after a long break?

Well below where you stopped. After two to four months off, returning to your old training load treats the break as if it never happened, and that’s when fatigue and injuries tend to follow.